The title may sound preposterous, but for many companies, content marketing has always been at the forefront of lead generation. That position makes it the top source of customers who actually dip into their pockets and pay for the product you’re offering. And yes, content means revenue, that is, if you have a solid content marketing strategy.

A real content marketing strategy is essential if you’re bent on leveraging content and turning it into revenue. So what makes an effective content marketing strategy?

Planning your content marketing strategy

When planning your content marketing strategy, you need to have an understanding of the Universal Marketing Funnel, a much more recent concept compared to the traditional funnel that all content marketers are familiar with.

The Universal Marketing Funnel is made up of three stages. At the top of this funnel is the “awareness” stage, where, as the name of the stage implies, you create content that is designed to make your existence, as well as what you can offer in terms of solutions, known to potential customers

The “evaluation” stage comes next, where you actually present your product’s case. The content that you write for this stage should focus on highlighting what makes the product or service you’re offering more preferable than what your competition is pushing.
The third and final stage of the Universal Marketing Funnel is the “decision” stage, where you make that sales pitch. In your sales pitch, it’s always best to highlight the key benefits of your product or service offer.

Building relationships with your audience

It’s crucial for content marketers to stay in the mind of their target markets, especially when it’s decision-making time. The best way to do that is build trust and friendship and foster a relationship. With potential buyers having such an insatiable thirst for knowledge and solutions for problems, forging that kind of relationship begins by providing them with content that’s valuable to them. To take things further, every content marketer should strive to create content that would establish thought-leadership, an ultimate goal that, to be honest, isn’t really that easy to achieve.

To establish a reputation as a thought leader or an expert in a particular field, a content marketer should focus on creating content that will better their chances of hitting that goal. To this end, we recommend that you create blog posts, white papers, case studies, testimonials, newsletters, and of course, social media content.

Understanding your audience

One essential part of building a solid content marketing strategy is understanding everything there is to understand about your target audience. Aside from having an understanding of what they need or want, it also pays to know where and how they spend their time on the Internet. With this knowledge, you will be able to come up with content that you know will grab their attention and eventually convert them into leads and eventually, customers.

If you have a team, we recommend that you do a lot of brainstorming once all your research is done. Throw ideas around about the type of content you can create as well as ways of distributing it. Today, social media is the best channel for content distribution, if only for the fact that more than 80 percent of B2B content marketers use it for that purpose.

Create content that will help your audience solve problems and distribute it through effective channels, and your chances of successfully leveraging that content into revenue will be much better.